Who taught you to pray? Often, we can speak about prayer as though it’s something we do intuitively, something we ‘just know’ how to do, and something very personal. So, prayer, as a 13th-century Dominican said, “is such an easy job”. Likewise, Pope St John XXIII, whose memory is kept today, said that “prayer is [simply] the raising of the mind to God”. And this is true, of course – prayer is a simply opening up of our heart and our deepest needs and desires before God. It is, as we do before our weekday Masses during Adoration, just being in God’s presence where, as St John Vianney says, we look at God and he looks at us with love.
And yet the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray. Which suggests to me that we can and need to be formed in prayer so that we pray better. The goal of genuine prayer is summed up in the first word of the Lord’s Prayer, “Abba”, Father. For we pray in order that we might learn to trust that God is our loving Father, a good and wise Father who never fails to give us whatever is geared towards our final good, namely our eternal salvation. Many people pray that God will give us what we think is best, what we want. But that is not Christian prayer. To pray with Christ and like Christ means that we call God “Abba”, Father, and so we believe that he knows what is best for us, even if that takes us to the Cross. As Jesus said in Gethsemane, “not my will by yours be done”.
This is why in the Mass we say that we “dare” to call God “Our Father”. Why? Because to call God our Father means that we desire to share in the attitude and identity of Jesus Christ. So it means that we trust in God with a humble and loving obedience like Christ’s, in total surrender to the will of the Father. To call God “Abba” means that we have the spirit of Sonship, the spirit of Christ animating us, as St Paul says. So, we can only truly call God “Abba” because the Holy Spirit lives in us, and fills us with the grace of Jesus Christ the Son.
The teacher of genuine prayer, therefore, is the Holy Spirit. And we are taught to pray whenever we come to the Mass. For it is here that we receive Christ’s Body and Blood and are filled with his grace. Moreover, it is here that we hear what the Son is called to be like. And most importantly, it is here in the Mass that we participate in the sacrifice of the Son on the Cross; here that we drink from the chalice that the Son accepted from the Father in the garden of Gethsemane. Hence the Mass is called the most perfect prayer because it is nothing less than the total offering of the Son to the Father, in an act of loving obedience and sacrifice for the salvation of Mankind.
When we come to the Mass, you and I are being caught up in this sacrificial prayer of Jesus. So, the more we enter into the contemplative spirit of the Liturgy, the more we can learn from Christ how to pray; the more we are being formed by the Holy Spirit in true prayer until we can truly call God “Abba” because we are so fully his children, who love and obey and honour him in all that we do just as Jesus does.
Therefore, let us follow the example of Pope St John XXIII. Concerning his own prayer life, he said: “It gives me joy to keep faithful to my religious practices: Holy Mass, the Divine Office, the whole rosary, with meditation on the mysteries, constant preoccupation with God and with spiritual things.” May we also find joy in these practices because it’s through them that we learn to truly pray, and so we are brought closer to God our loving Father.
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